The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn – review

This serviceable adventure romp has the hallmarks of a decent family movie but
occasionally slips into airless pastiche, writes Robbie Collin.

As directors go, Steven Spielberg is a distinctive one, and as a writer and artist, Hergé is unmistakable – so it’s odd that The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn feels like the work of neither man. Instead, it’s a serviceable all-ages adventure romp that trades heavily on audiences’ affection for both the books and those who have adapted them without giving an awful lot back.

At its best, the film (actually a mishmash of Unicorn, The Crab With The Golden Claws, Red Rackham’s Treasure and selected moments from other Hergé works) is a rapid-fire 3D animation that’s certainly on a par with other cartoons by DreamWorks, if not those of Pixar. A terrifically-plotted motorbike chase through a North African marketplace presented in one continuous take is a highlight, as is Andy Serkis’s full-blooded, frequently hilarious turn as Captain Archibald Haddock. But at its worst it’s an airless pastiche, whose restive camera and occasionally smart-Alec script recreates the romance and logic of the source books on a superficial level only.

The film is also hobbled by its reliance on performance capture – the method by which actors’ movements and expressions are translated into 3D computer graphics – simply because the graphics are not good enough. Weta Digital might be able to render the thousand or so hairs in Tintin’s quiff with ease, but watch their PCs’ gears crunch when they try to digitise a personality.

This has quite a few of the hallmarks of a decent family movie, but as a fan of both the Tintin adventures and Spielberg’s cinematic swashbuckling since childhood, it left me underwhelmed. Hergé famously said that Spielberg was the only director capable of capturing the unique essence of his creation. That probably remains true. But this film hasn’t done it.